I agree that it makes some things easier (at the expense of managing constructors/destructors), I'm disputing the blanket assertion that it's superior to manual management, in the context of Jai (and Odin). You're also introducing a reference count, but that's besides the point.

In Jai/Odin, every scope has default global and temp allocators, there's nothing stopping you from transferring ownership and/or passing pointers down the callstack. Then you either free in the last scope where the pointer lives or you pick a natural lifetime near the top of the callstack, defer clear temp there, and forget about it.

You may also want to pass a resource through something like a channel, promise/future pair or similar. So it's not just down/up the callstack, sometimes it's "sideways". In those cases RAII is a life savior. Otherwise you have to explicitly remember about covering all possibilities: - what if resource never enters the channel - what if it enters the channel but never gets retrieved on the other side - what if the channel gets closed - what if other side tries to retrieve but cancels

Or you leak the resource.

> You're also introducing a reference count, but that's besides the point.

How so? RAII absolutely doesn't imply reference counting.